Well folks, the time has come. After running Mallards Mayhem/Hockey Mayhem for the last 10+ years, I will be closing the forum down on July 1st, 2016. We’ve had some ups and downs during those 10+ years, but in the end, we ended up being one of the strongest hockey forums on the interwebs. We have seen so many other forums during that time “go dark” or “fold” while we flourished with a strong membership group, but just like them, our membership participation dwindled down too little to nothing. During our time as one of the top dogs in the hockey forum world, we had member accounts from league officials, team owners, team GM’s, players and more that little to no one but me ever actually knew (thanks to people using their works email addresses or names in their email address when creating accounts). We had several very good “insiders” that fed us great information allowing us to break the news before anyone else. Also got threatened with several lawsuits over the years as well. I looked at those as a good thing and also a bad thing. Good thing, because we were making waves in the hockey forum world and people didn’t like it (so they came after me). Bad thing, cause I didn’t wanna actually get sued by anyone for making those waves. Luckily for me, I was either able to defuse the situation, or they just plain never went through with it and were just bluffing. Like everything else, our insiders eventually got out of the hockey world and we no longer were the go-to place to find that awesome insider information on the latest player signing, trade, or even team folding.

During our rise to the top, it was fun as hell. To be able to travel to other barns to see games and have people know exactly who you are and come up to talk to you like you’re a freaking rock star was really cool. I put a lot of hard work, time, and money into the site to try and make it as unique, fun, and have the best hockey info on the internet as I could. I stuck to my guns over the years and let members who posted, fully express themselves when it came to their teams, players, and front offices. To me, I always felt that if you were a paying customer, then you had the right to complain about the product you were watching. I didn’t want the site to be nothing but cheerleaders for teams, leagues, etc…..which led to some absolute great debates and discussions over the years.

I feel that with the rise of Facebook Groups over the last few years, forums and message boards have become a dying breed. Most people in the world have Facebook accounts (especially younger people), and it’s so much easier to join a group on Facebook and participate in discussions all in one place, on one account, rather than visit a third party hockey forum. The 2015-16 offseason I took a long look at closing the site, but had really hoped that it might pick back up when the new season started; but it just never came to fruition.

With all that said, I would like to thank all the past and present Hockey Mayhem members who contributed to the forum with posts over the years and for following me on my journey the last 10+ years to try and make HM one of the top hockey forums on the internet. At the time of this writing, HockeyMayhem.com has been viewed more than 960,000 times, and combined with Mallards Mayhem which ran for a couple of years before switching the site over to HM, the site(s) have been viewed more than 2.3 million times. I don’t know about you, but that sounds like one helluva way to go out!

Thank you to all of the great hockey fans who supported myself and Mallards Mayhem/Hockey Mayhem for the last 10+ years. It was an absolute privilege and pleasure to have worked for all you.